The body of a typical vehicle has a floor with a rigid floor structure. In these vehicles, the passenger compartment is usually defined in part by a floor covering for the floor structure. This floor covering may include, for instance, a sound attenuating silencer overlying the floor structure and carpeting overlying the silencer.
Any combination of design criteria may call for increased rigidity across some spans of the carpeting. Measures for realizing this increased rigidity may include, for example, using separate backing materials for the carpeting, increasing the cross sectional thickness of the carpeting or increasing the density of the carpeting.